08/10/2012

We caught up with the South London based DollsMaison team in an inspiring studio space at the bottom of their garden. As well as getting a behind-the-scenes look at a photoshoot, we talked everything from trends and dream workspaces to what they’ve got in store for the season…

So, Dolls Maison – who, where and why?

DollsMaison is made up of 3 friends brought together by our love of vintage and classic styling just under a year ago. We all hail from South London, where our operation is based. We started selling solely footwear and have since diversified into clothing and accessories, slowly turning DollsMaison into a one-stop shopping emporium for vintage lovers across the globe.

We are constantly on the prowl for great new pieces to be added to our collection, which takes us all across the UK and to Europe. Each piece is personally handpicked and if it doesn’t fit with our seasonal themes then it gets canned - unless the piece is fab of course!

What are you inspired by this season?

This season we have been inspired by clean simple classic lines and earth tones, such as taupes, browns, khakis and camels whilst injecting a splash of colour in the form of purples, burgundys, reds and mustards. We’ve also looked at AW12 Fashion Week shows to get an idea of the biggest trends coming through and try to tailor our buys to fit.

We have been very careful to buy pieces that are on trend and wouldn’t look out of place in high street stores such as Zara, for the clean classic lines or Whistles for the prints. For example we have a lot of vintage houndstooth, geometric prints and a few velvet pieces coming through.

Tell us about your typical working day

The good thing about this business is that no one day is typical as such; each day throws up a new challenge. If I had to detail a ‘typical’ working day though it would start with checking though all emails we’ve received from the night before, it’s really important that we answer every single query in a timely manner. The worse thing as a customer is to feel like you are not valued, also as a developing business you may miss out on a great opportunity. We would also embark on some social media management which includes the upkeep of our Tumblr, blog, Twitter and Facebook sites. Next it’s time for new listings, we don’t like to bombard shoppers with loads of new items at once, we like to trickle it though usually by theme/collection and leave them wanting more. Also there’s the daily postal run, at about 3pm all orders received are gathered, wrapped a personalised thank you note is written to each and every customer and the schlep to the post office begins!

Let’s hear about your studio; where is it and how have you made it your own?

At the moment we are operating out of our Wondershed in Dulwich, it’s such a cool little space built at the end of a garden by the husband of one of the trio! We have everything we could want in that one space, a stereo so we can listen to some wicked tunes as we work, a huge plasma screen to watch the fashion week shows on, a sewing machine to repair any faults or make alterations to an item and the best piece of all is the vintage velvet Chesterfield sofa with a vintage Union Jack flag draped over it to chill out on....LOVE!

What would your dream workspace look like?

Oh that’s an easy one, it would be some kind of converted warehouse space with original Victorian features, exposed beams, part exposed brick and part painted brick walls with really high ceilings and a steel spiral staircase leading up to our fabulous white wash showroom, in somewhere like Shoreditch or Central London....awesome!

Can we get a sneaky preview of what you’ve got coming up?

So for next season, on top of continuing with growing our vintage line, we’re bringing in more premium labels and further developing our limited edition vintage reworked line that we have just started working on. We can’t go into too much detail about the collection but it’ll be fab so watch this space!